Super Mario Bros. 256 Worlds

Hello, everybody. Today I’m going to write about this cartridge I got recently.

As you can see, the label claims to be Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels. Known in Japan as Super Mario Bros. 2.

I mean, I can’t read Japanese, but you can compare this to the official Lost Levels label and I think you’ll agree it is quite similar.

Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels was only officially released on the Famicom on disk format for the Famicom Disk System. Maybe this cartridge is a copy of the disk game onto a cartridge. (They make those).

Well let’s power it on and see what it is:

Hm. Just regular Super Mario Bros.

…wait.

World Y-1?

Why does it say that?

Because this is Super Mario Bros. 256 Worlds Version.

What’s that mean?

Well, you may know that the original Super Mario Bros. had a bonus where after you completed the game, you could use a level select to pick which world you were started on. 256 Worlds lets you have that level select right from the start. But that’s not all. The counter doesn’t stop at World 8, which is supposed to be the last world. It keeps going up from there. In fact, you can select 256 different worlds. All the worlds have one-character numbers though, so it displays some of them as World Y-1 or World !-1. And most of the times it just picks a random tile, like part of the ? block or part of a bullet bill block.

Of course, these aren’t actually secret levels that were left in the code. It just makes the game read garbage data and display weird levels like never-ending bonus levels, underwater castles, etc. Here are some pictures of the more interesting ones. (some of them are just duplicates of the normal levels)